Following the end of Americas combat role in Vietnam in
1973, and the subsequent fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) in 1975, the
often prophesied and much feared resurgence of McCarthyite Red-baiting, the bitter
accusations of "who lost Vietnam?" barely transpired. Rather than massive
recriminations, a collective amnesia took hold. The majority of Americans, it appeared,
neither wanted to talk or think about their nation's longest and most debilitating
war--the only war the United States ever lost. That forgetfulness gave way in the early
1980s to a renewed interest in the war: Hollywood, network television, and the music
industry made Vietnam a staple of popular culture; and scholars, journalists, and Vietnam
veterans produced a flood of literature on the conflict, especially concerning its lessons
and legacies. Much of it, emphasizing the enormity of the damage done to American
attitudes, institutions, and foreign policy by the Vietnam ordeal, echoed George R.
Kennan's depiction of the Vietnam War as "the most disastrous of all America's
undertakings over the whole two hundred years of its history."

Initially, the humiliating defeat imposed by a nation Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger had described as "a fourth-rate power" caused a loss of pride and
self-confidence in a people that liked to think of the United States as invincible. An
agonizing reappraisal of American power and glory dampened the celebration of the
Bicentennial birthday in 1976. So did the economic woes then afflicting the United States,
which many blamed on the estimated $167 billion spent on the war. President Lyndon B.
Johnson's decision to finance a major war and the Great Society simultaneously, without a
significant increase in taxation, launched a runaway double-digit inflation and mounting
federal debt that ravaged the American economy and eroded living standards from the late
1960s into the 1990s.

The United States also paid a high political cost for the Vietnam War. It weakened
public faith in government, and in the honesty and competence of its leaders. Indeed,
skepticism, if not cynicism, and a high degree of suspicion of and distrust toward
authority of all kind characterized the views of an increasing number of Americans in the
wake of the war. The military, especially, was discredited for years. It would gradually
rebound to become once again one of the most highly esteemed organizations in the United
States. In the main, however, as never before, Americans after the Vietnam War neither
respected nor trusted public institutions.

They were wary of official calls to intervene abroad in the cause of democracy and
freedom, and the bipartisan consensus that had supported American foreign policy since the
1940s dissolved. Democrats, in particular, questioned the need to contain communism
everywhere around the globe and to play the role of the planet's policeman. The Democratic
majority in Congress would enact the 1973 War Powers Resolution, ostensibly forbidding the
president from sending U.S. troops into combat for more than ninety days without
congressional consent. Exercising a greater assertiveness in matters of foreign policy,
Congress increasingly emphasized the limits of American power, and the ceiling on the cost
Americans would pay in pursuit of specific foreign policy objectives. The fear of getting
bogged down in another quagmire made a majority of Americans reluctant to intervene
militarily in Third World countries. The neo-isolationist tendency that former President
Richard M. Nixon called "the Vietnam syndrome" would be most manifest in the
public debates over President Ronald Reagan's interventionist policies in Nicaragua and
President George Bush's decision to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. Despite the
victorious outcome of the Persian Gulf War for the United States and its allies, and
President Bush's declaration in March 1991--"By God, we've kicked the Vietnam
syndrome once and for all!"--the fear of intervention would reappear in the public
debate over President Bill Clinton's commitment of U.S. peacekeeping forces in Somalia and
Bosnia. Quite clearly, for at least a quarter of a century after the Vietnam War ended,
that conflict continued to loom large in the minds of Americans. Accordingly, a new
consensus among foreign policy makers, reflecting the lessons learned from the Vietnam
War, became manifest: the United States should use military force only as a last resort;
only where the national interest is clearly involved; only when there is strong public
support; and only in the likelihood of a relatively quick, inexpensive victory.

Another consensus also gradually emerged. At first, rather than giving returning
veterans of the war welcoming parades, Americans seemed to shun, if not denigrate, the 2
million-plus Americans who went to Vietnam, the 1.6 million who served in combat, the
300,000 physically wounded, the many more who bore psychological scars, the 2,387 listed
as "missing in action," and the more than 58,000 who died. Virtually nothing was
done to aid veterans and their loved ones who needed assistance in adjusting. Then a
torrent of fiction, films, and television programs depicted Vietnam vets as drug-crazed
psychotic killers, as vicious executioners in Vietnam and equally vicious menaces at home.
Not until after the 1982 dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.,
did American culture acknowledge their sacrifice and suffering, and concede that most had
been good soldiers in a bad war.

Yet this altered view of the Vietnam veterans as victims as much as victimizers, if not
as brave heroes, was not accompanied by new public policies. Although most veterans did
succeed in making the transition to ordinary civilian life, many did not. More Vietnam
veterans committed suicide after the war than had died in it. Even more--perhaps
three-quarters of a million--became part of the lost army of the homeless. And the nearly
700,000 draftees, many of them poor, badly educated, and nonwhite, who had received less
than honorable discharges, depriving them of educational and medical benefits, found it
especially difficult to get and keep jobs, to maintain family relationships, and to stay
out of jail. Although a majority of Americans came to view dysfunctional veterans as
needing support and medical attention rather than moral condemnation, the Veterans
Administration, reluctant to admit the special difficulties faced by these veterans and
their need for additional benefits, first denied the harm done by chemicals like Agent
Orange and by the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) afflicting as many as 700,000, and
then stalled on providing treatment.

Although diminishing, the troublesome specter of the Vietnam War continued to divide
Americans and haunt the national psyche. It surfaced again in 1988 when Bush's running
mate, Dan Quayle, had to defend his reputation against revelations that he had used family
political connections to be admitted into the Indiana National Guard in 1969 to avoid the
draft and a possible tour of duty in Vietnam. It emerged four years later when Bill
Clinton, the Democratic candidate for president, faced accusations that he had evaded the
draft and then organized antiwar demonstrations in 1969 while he was a Rhodes scholar in
England. In each instance, such charges reminded Americans of the difficult choices young
Americans had to make in what many saw as at best a morally ambiguous war.

Mostly, remembrances continue to be stirred by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the most
visited site in the nation's capital. Its stark black granite reflecting panels, covered
with the names of the more than 58,000 American men and women who died in Vietnam, is a
shrine to the dead, a tombstone in a sloping valley of death. Lacking all the symbols of
heroism, glory, patriotism, and moral certainty that more conventional war memorials
possess, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a somber reminder of the loss of too many young
Americans, and of what the war did to the United States and its messianic belief in its
own overweening virtue.